AfroFuturism -- Fiction
Children of Blood and Bone by
Instant New York Times Bestseller New York Times Notable Children's Books of 2018 TIME Top 10 Best YA and Children's Books of 2018 NPR's Book Concierge 2018 Great Reads List Buzzfeed's 24 Best YA Books of 2018 Bustle's Top 25 Best Young Adults Books of 2018 2018 Kirkus Prize Finalist YALSA William C. Morris YA Debut Award Finalist Paste Magazine's 30 Best YA Novels of 2018 Newsweek's 61 Best Books from 2018 Boston Globe's Best Children's Books of 2018 Publishers Weekly Best YA Books of 2018 School Library Journal Best Books of 2018 2019 YALSA Teen's Top Ten List With five starred reviews, Tomi Adeyemi's West African-inspired fantasy debut, and instant #1 New York Times Bestseller, conjures a world of magic and danger, perfect for fans of Leigh Bardugo and Sabaa Tahir. They killed my mother. They took our magic. They tried to bury us. Now we rise. Zélie Adebola remembers when the soil of Orïsha hummed with magic. Burners ignited flames, Tiders beckoned waves, and Zélie's Reaper mother summoned forth souls. But everything changed the night magic disappeared. Under the orders of a ruthless king, maji were killed, leaving Zélie without a mother and her people without hope. Now Zélie has one chance to bring back magic and strike against the monarchy. With the help of a rogue princess, Zélie must outwit and outrun the crown prince, who is hell-bent on eradicating magic for good. Danger lurks in Orïsha, where snow leoponaires prowl and vengeful spirits wait in the waters. Yet the greatest danger may be Zélie herself as she struggles to control her powers and her growing feelings for an enemy. "A phenomenon." --Entertainment Weekly "The epic I've been waiting for." --New York Times-bestselling author Marie Lu "You will be changed. You will be ready to rise up and reclaim your own magic!" --New York Times-bestselling author Dhonielle Clayton "The next big thing in literature and film." --Ebony "One of the biggest young adult fiction debut book deals of theyear." --Teen Vogue This title has Common Core connections. #1 New York Times bestseller, March 14, 2018
Call Number: PS3601.D49 C55 2018ISBN: 9781250170972Publication Date: 2018-03-06
Kindred by
The visionary author's masterpiece pulls us--along with her Black female hero--through time to face the horrors of slavery and explore the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now. Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.
Call Number: PS3552.U827 K5 2003ISBN: 9780807083697Publication Date: 2004-02-01
Fledgling by
A newly expanded edition of Octavia E. Butler's only collection of short stories. Butler graces new mansions of thought with her eloquent, distinguished and poignant prose. Although this book is little in size, its ideas are splendidly large.' - Booklist 'The title story is justly famous. Splendid pieces, set forth in calm, lucid prose with never a word wasted.' - Kirkus Reviews This New York Times notable Book includes the Hugo and the Nebula awards winner Bloodchild and the Hugo Award winner Speech Shounds.'
Call Number: PS3552.U827 F47 2005ISBN: 1583226907Publication Date: 2005-10-04
Parable of the Sower by
After her neighborhood is overrun by a pyromaniac cult, adolescent Lauren Olamina gains followers on her way toward refuge in California. Awards: SLJ Best Book; YALSA Best Book for Young Adults.
Call Number: PS3552.U827 P37 1993ISBN: 0941423999Publication Date: 1993-11-01
Binti by
Her name is Binti, and she is the first of the Himba people ever to be offered a place at Oomza University, the finest institution of higher learning in the galaxy. But to accept the offer will mean giving up her place in her family to travel between the stars among strangers who do not share her ways or respect her customs.Knowledge comes at a cost, one that Binti is willing to pay, but her journey will not be easy. The world she seeks to enter has long warred with the Meduse, an alien race that has become the stuff of nightmares. Oomza University has wronged the Meduse, and Binti's stellar travel will bring her within their deadly reach.If Binti hopes to survive the legacy of a war not of her making, she will need both the the gifts of her people and the wisdom enshrined within the university itself - but first she has to make it there, alive.
Call Number: PS3615.K67 B56 2015ISBN: 9780765385253Publication Date: 2015-09-22
The Broken Kingdoms by
A man with no memory of his past and a struggling, blind street artist will face off against the will of the gods as the secrets of this stranger's past are revealed in the sequel to The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, the debut novel of NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin. In the city of Shadow, beneath the World Tree, alleyways shimmer with magic and godlings live hidden among mortalkind. Oree Shoth, a blind artist, takes in a strange homeless man on an impulse. This act of kindness engulfs Oree in a nightmarish conspiracy. Someone, somehow, is murdering godlings, leaving their desecrated bodies all over the city. And Oree's guest is at the heart of it. . . The Inheritance Trilogy The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms The Broken Kingdoms The Kingdom of Gods The Inheritance Trilogy (omnibus edition) Shades in Shadow: An Inheritance Triptych (e-only short fiction) The Awakened Kingdom (e-only novella) For more from N. K. Jemisin, check out: Dreamblood Duology The Killing Moon The Shadowed Sun The Broken Earth series The Fifth Season The Obelisk Gate The Stone Sky
Call Number: PS3610.E46 B76 2010ISBN: 9780316043960Publication Date: 2010-11-03
An Unkindness of Ghosts by
For generations, the Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way, the ship's leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster, who they consider to be less than human. When the autopsy of Matilda's sovereign reveals a surprising link between his death and her mother's suicide some quarter-century before, Aster retraces her mother's footsteps. Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer and sowing the seeds of civil war, Aster learns there may be a way off the ship if she's willing to fight for it.
Call Number: PS3619.O4373 U54 2017ISBN: 9781617755880Publication Date: 2017-10-03
19th Century Black Non-Fiction
The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper by
This is the first collection of Cooper's major writings, including many never before published.
Call Number: E185.86 .C58214 1998ISBN: 0847684083Publication Date: 1998-01-01
Barracoon by
New York Times Bestseller A major literary event: a newly published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade--abducted from Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States. In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo's past--memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War. Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo's unique vernacular, and written from Hurston's perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.
Call Number: E444.L49 H87 2018ISBN: 9780062748201Publication Date: 2018-05-08
The History of Mary Prince by
The History of Mary Prince A West Indian Slave Related by Herself Mary Prince and Asa-Asa With a Supplement by the Editor A SLAVE NARRATIVE Mary Prince (c. 1788-after 1833) was born in Devonshire Parish, Bermuda, to an enslaved family of African descent. While she was later living in London, her autobiography, The History of Mary Prince (1831), was the first account of the life of a black woman to be published in the United Kingdom. Belonging to the genre of slave narratives, this first-hand description of the brutalities of enslavement, released at a time when slavery was still legal in Bermuda and British Caribbean colonies, had a galvanising effect on the anti-slavery movement. It went through three printings in the first year. Prince had her account transcribed while living and working in England at the home of Thomas Pringle and created the Anti-Slavery Society. She had gone to London with her master and his family in 1828 from Antigua. I was born at Brackish-Pond, in Bermuda, on a farm belonging to Mr. Charles Myners. My mother was a household slave; and my father, whose name was Prince, was a sawyer belonging to Mr. Trimmingham, a ship-builder at Crow-Lane. When I was an infant, old Mr. Myners died, and there was a division of the slaves and other property among the family. I was bought along with my mother by old Captain Darrel, and given to his grandchild, little Miss Betsey Williams. Captain Williams, Mr. Darrel's son-in-law, was master of a vessel which traded to several places in America and the West Indies, and he was seldom at home long together. Mrs. Williams was a kind-hearted good woman, and she treated all her slaves well. She had only one daughter, Miss Betsey, for whom I was purchased, and who was about my own age. I was made quite a pet of by Miss Betsey, and loved her very much. She used to lead me about by the hand, and call me her little nigger. This was the happiest period of my life; for I was too young to understand rightly my condition as a slave, and too thoughtless and full of spirits to look forward to the days of toil and sorrow.
Call Number: HT869.P6 A3 1997ISBN: 9781512133530Publication Date: 2015-05-10
Narrative of Sojourner Truth by
Truth's landmark slave narrative chronicles her experiences as a slave in upstate New York and her transformation into an extraordinary abolitionist, feminist, orator, and preacher. Based on the complete 1884 edition, this volume includes the "Book of Life," a collection of letters and sketches about Truth's life written subsequent to the original 1850 publication of the Narrative, and "A Memorial Chapter," a sentimental account of her death. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Call Number: E185.97.T8 G55 1998ISBN: 0140436782Publication Date: 1998-11-01
Olaudah Equiano: the Life and Legacy of the Freed Slave Whose Autobiography Fueled Britain's Abolitionist Movement by
*Includes pictures *Includes Equiano's quotes about his life and work *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading "I believe there are few events in my life which have not happened to many; it is true the incidents of it are numerous, and, did I consider myself an European, I might say my sufferings were great; but when I compare my lot with that of most of my countrymen, I regard myself as a particular favorite of heaven, and acknowledge the mercies of Providence in every occurrence of my life." - Olaudah Equiano The slave trade that brought African captives to Europe and the Americas was established in the 15th century by merchants controlling Portugal's booming trade routes, but the perception of the non-white as an unconscious, undeveloped being had been prevalent in more ancient times. By the time Britain's European neighbors and the American colonies had fully invested in the African as a beast of burden fit only for servitude, little had changed over the parade of empires that had come and gone. Accounts of rhetorical exchanges and messages from the pulpits of the 17th century are said to have contested the idea of whether Africans were in possession of souls. In the minds of some, colonial slaves shared this distinction with women of any color. The movement to abolish slavery in Britain, the continent, and subsequently, the New World, began to gain traction with the British community by the early 18th century. This took place some years before similar uprisings in the Americas but was hampered by the fact that neither the typical Briton nor the average American ever saw the inner-workings of the slave trade world. The stealing of humans from the African coast, the domestic marketplace, and the infamously cruel shipment of human cargo to the West was not witnessed by most people, living apart as they did from the stealing, buying, and selling. Abolitionists, such as Thomas Clarkson and numerous others, took it upon themselves to break down the walls of the African myth and reveal to the white citizenry the slave trade's central process in graphic images and descriptions. Such an effort won its share of supporters over time, however, when an African man and freed slave wrote his own autobiographical narrative, speaking to learned audiences as their equal, the paradigm was rocked to its foundations. Olaudah Equiano challenged the image of the unconscious African beast with such intellect, philosophical refinement, public presence, and elegant writing, that standard British perceptions began to unravel. It is rational to assume that with his emergence as a respected world traveler, abolition of the slave trade was pushed forward by an incalculable number of years. Within his life, Equiano was to become the first black British politician, with a constituency of slaves and freemen enjoying representation for the first time in their cultural history. Equiano's written account of his birth and early childhood has been met with some controversy, and in the absence of written records, the precise details may never be known. That he lived much of his life as a slave is irrefutable, and many historians discount the importance of his early childhood. Equiano claims to have been born in the Eboe province of modern-day Nigeria, more specifically in Epsaka of the Igbo culture. Doubts over this claim stem from two written documents in what is now South Carolina in the U.S., one a birth record, the other a naval muster roll for an American ship. Various reasons are offered for their veracity or lack thereof, and several instances are cited under which Equiano might have found it necessary to alter his origins. Apart from these disagreements, everything else in the detailed autobiography is verifiable.
Call Number: HT869.E6 A3 2001ISBN: 9781979928113Publication Date: 2017-11-21
Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom by
This compelling narrative offers a firsthand account of a couple's remarkable flight from slavery in the antebellum South. William and Ellen Craft devised a daring plan in which the light-skinned wife disguised herself as a man and the husband posed as her servant. This brief memoir recounts their journey northward in 1848, when they made their way to Philadelphia and later settled in Boston, where they were active in abolitionist circles. Originally published in 1860, the Crafts' account of their escape was an immediate success. Their story offers fascinating insights into issues of race, gender, and class in nineteenth-century America.
Call Number: E450 .C8ISBN: 9780486793481Publication Date: 2014-08-20
Historical Fiction
The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by
The newest Oprah's Book Club 2.0 selection. The arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction. A debut of extraordinary distinction: Ayana Mathis tells the story of the children of the Great Migration through the trials of one unforgettable family. In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. She vows to prepare them for the calamitous difficulty they are sure to face in their later lives, to meet a world that will not love them, a world that will not be kind. Captured here in twelve luminous narrative threads, their lives tell the story of a mother's monumental courage and the journey of a nation. Beautiful and devastating, Ayana Mathis's The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is wondrous from first to last--glorious, harrowing, unexpectedly uplifting, and blazing with life. An emotionally transfixing page-turner, a searing portrait of striving in the face of insurmountable adversity, an indelible encounter with the resilience of the human spirit and the driving force of the American dream.
Call Number: PS3613.A82847 T76 2012ISBN: 9780385350280Publication Date: 2012-12-06
Homegoing by
NATIONAL BESTSELLER "Homegoing is an inspiration." --Ta-Nehisi Coates A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction. Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle's dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast's booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia's descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation. Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi's magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical forces beyond their control. Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer.
Call Number: PS3607.Y37 H66 2016ISBN: 9781101947135Publication Date: 2016-06-07
Ruby by
*Trigger warning* The newest Oprah's Book Club 2.0 selection The epic, unforgettable story of a man determined to protect the woman he loves from the town desperate to destroy her--this beautiful and devastating debut heralds the arrival of a major new voice in fiction. Ephram Jennings has never forgotten the beautiful girl with the long braids running through the piney woods of Liberty, their small East Texas town. Young Ruby, "the kind of pretty it hurt to look at," has suffered beyond imagining, so as soon as she can, she flees suffocating Liberty for the bright pull of 1950s New York. Ruby quickly winds her way into the ripe center of the city--the darkened piano bars and hidden alleyways of the Village--all the while hoping for a glimpse of the red hair and green eyes of her mother. When a telegram from her cousin forces her to return home, thirty-year-old Ruby Bell finds herself reliving the devastating violence of her girlhood. With the terrifying realization that she might not be strong enough to fight her way back out again, Ruby struggles to survive her memories of the town's dark past. Meanwhile, Ephram must choose between loyalty to the sister who raised him and the chance for a life with the woman he has loved since he was a boy. Full of life, exquisitely written, and suffused with the pastoral beauty of the rural South, Ruby is a transcendent novel of passion and courage. This wondrous page-turner rushes through the red dust and gossip of Main Street, to the pit fire where men swill bootleg outside Bloom's Juke, to Celia Jennings's kitchen where a cake is being made, yolk by yolk, that Ephram will use to try to begin again with Ruby. Utterly transfixing, with unforgettable characters, riveting suspense, and breathtaking, luminous prose, Ruby offers an unflinching portrait of man's dark acts and the promise of the redemptive power of love.
Call Number: PS3602 .O65645 R83 2014ISBN: 9780804139090Publication Date: 2014-04-29
The Color Purple by
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that tells the story of two sisters through their correspondence. With a new Preface by the author.
Call Number: PS3573.A425 C6 1992ISBN: 0151191549Publication Date: 1992-05-22
The Underground Railroad by
From #1 New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist Colson Whitehead, a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood--where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned--Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor--engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom. Like the protagonist of Gulliver's Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey--hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share. From the Hardcover edition.
Call Number: PS3573.H4768 U53 2016ISBN: 9781524736309Publication Date: 2016-08-02
